An exploration of poverty as a consumption object: voluntourist’s stories from an orphanage in Nepal

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the understanding of poverty emerging in voluntourists’ accounts of their first-hand experiences of poverty alleviation. Based on the ethnography of an orphanage in Nepal, we show that despite voluntourists’ good intentions and even (self-)criticism of the volunteer tourism approach to poverty relief, their accounts tend to consolidate rather regressive ideas about poverty. We draw on postcolonial and post-development theory to illuminate specific ways in which the old Orientalist tropes and discourses of othering are perpetuated in this novel neoliberal form of travelling. We contribute to the critical work on voluntourism and market-based approaches to societal and environmental problems by focusing on poverty as an object of consumption. Such a conception emerges from how the voluntourists’ stories were shaped by and refracted through the structure of voluntourism and the logics of social media. Such refraction leads to systematic depoliticisation of global inequality and responses to poverty.

KEYWORDS:

• Voluntourism
• poverty
• orientalism
• post development
• ethnography

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amira Benali

Amira Benali an Assistant Professor at the Department of Culture and Learning. She holds a PhD in socioeconomics from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Her work focuses on gender, social justice, poverty and alternative economies.

Olga Kravets

Olga Kravets is a senior lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are in politics of consumer culture, with the focus on studying inequalities from critical theory and feminist perspectives. She has been a co-organiser of Consumption, Markets, and Culture Theorisation Doctoral Seminar since 2007 and she co-edited The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture and The Routledge Companion to Marketing and Feminism. Her research has been published in Journal of Marketing, Business History Review, Journal of Material Culture, Marketing Theory among others and in edited books.